Sara Paretsky - Total Recall

“Hoffman had a son, right? Did his boy and yours hang out together?”

“Oh, goodness me, no-his boy started college the year Howie was born. I don’t know if I ever even met him, it was just Mr. Hoffman always talking about him, how everything he did was for his boy-of course, I shouldn’t poke fun, I felt the same way about Howie. But somehow it griped me, all the money he could come up with to spend on his son, while Mr. Fepple, who owned the agency, didn’t have near as much. Mr. Hoffman sent his son off to some fancy eastern school to college, someplace that sounded like Harvard but wasn’t. But I never heard his boy amounted to anything much, even with all that expensive education.”

“Do you know what became of him? The son, I mean?”

She shook her head. “I heard he was like a hospital clerk or something, but after Mr. Hoffman passed away, we didn’t hear anything about him. It wasn’t like we knew anyone who knew him, in a social way, I mean.”

“Did your son talk about Hoffman lately?” I asked. “Did he mention problems with any of Mr. Hoffman’s old clients? I’m wondering in particular if any of them might have threatened him. Or maybe made him so depressed about the business that he didn’t see how he could make it work.”

She shook her head, sniffling again as she thought of her son’s last days. “But that’s why I don’t think he killed himself. He was, oh, sort of excited, like he gets-got-when he had a new idea in mind. He said he finally understood how Hoffman made so much money out of his list. He figured he could get me a Mercedes of my own if I wanted. Pretty soon, he said. Now, well, I do clerical work up in Western Springs, and I guess I’ll just keep on until I retire.”

The bleakness of the prospect depressed me almost as much as it did her. I asked abruptly when she’d last seen her son.

Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes. “Friday morning. When I was leaving for work he was getting up. He said he had a dinner meeting with a client, so he’d be home late. Then, when he didn’t come home, I got worried. I called the office off and on on Saturday, but he does sometimes-did sometimes-go to these table-tennis tournaments out of town. I thought maybe he forgot to tell me. Or maybe he had a date-I did kind of wonder, the way he dressed so carefully Friday morning. I try-tried-to remember he’s not still a child, although it’s hard, when he’s living right here at home.”

I tried to get a client name from her, wondering if Isaiah Sommers had come around threatening him. But much as she would have liked to blame Howie’s death on some black person from the South Side, Rhonda Fepple couldn’t remember his mentioning any names.

“The officers who talked to you this morning, they didn’t bother to search your son’s room, did they? No, I didn’t think they would-they were too fixed on their suicide theory. Could I take a look?”

She still didn’t ask me for identification but led me down the hall to her son’s room. She must have given him the master suite when her husband died-it was a large room, with a king-size bed and a small desk.

The room smelled of sour sweat and other things I didn’t want to think about. Mrs. Fepple murmured something apologetic about laundry and tried to pick up some of the clothes from the floor. She stood looking from a polka-dotted shirt in her left hand to a pair of shorts in her right, as if trying to figure out what they were, then let them fall back to the floor. After that she just stood, watching me as if I were the television screen, a soothing but meaningless piece of motion in the room.

Rummaging through dresser and desk drawers, I found cell phones from two earlier generations of models, a collection of startling porn that Fepple had apparently printed off the Web, a half dozen broken calculators, and three table-tennis paddles, but no documents of any kind. I went through his closet and even looked between the mattress and box springs. All I found was another collection of porn, this time magazines that dated back several years-he must have forgotten about them when he learned how to cruise the Net.

The only insurance documents in the room were company pamphlets stacked on the desktop. Not the Sommers file nor even a datebook-which hadn’t been in his briefcase or office-nor any more pages like the one I’d found in his briefcase this morning.

I pulled one of the photocopies of the page from my own case and showed it to her. “Do you know what this is? It was in your son’s office.”

She looked at it with the same apathy she’d given my search. “That? I couldn’t tell you.”

She started to hand it back to me, then said it might be Mr. Hoffman’s handwriting. “He kept these leather books with his name stamped on the cover in gold. He’d take them around with him to his customers and check off when they paid, just like on here.”

She tapped the check marks with her index finger. “One day I picked up his book when he was in the washroom, and when he came back you’d think I was a Russian spy going after the atom bomb, the way he carried on. Like I knew what any of it meant.”

“Does this writing look like Hoffman’s writing?”

She shrugged. “I haven’t seen it in years. I just remember it was scrunched up like this, kind of hard to read, but real even, like it was engraving.”

I looked around, discouraged. “What I hoped to find was some kind of diary. Your son didn’t have one on his desk at the office, nor in his briefcase. Do you know how he kept track of his appointments?”

“He had one of those handheld gadgets, one of those electronic things. Yeah, like that,” she added when I showed her my Palm Pilot. “If it wasn’t on him, then whoever killed him must’ve stolen it.”

Which either meant an appointment with his killer or-a random attack where the killer stole pawnable electronics. The computer had been left there-but it would have been hard to smuggle past the guard. I asked Mrs. Fepple if the cops had returned her son’s possessions to her, but those were still part of crime-scene evidence; the technicians were keeping them until the autopsy gave them a definitive report of suicide.

“Was he renting month-by-month, or is there a lease?”

He’d gone to month-by-month. She agreed to lend me a spare office key that she’d kept, but the thought of having to get all those files packed up by the end of September, and of having to work with the various companies to shift active policyholders to a new agency, made her droop further into her yellow shirt.

“I don’t know what I thought you’d be able to tell me, but it doesn’t seem like you’re going to be able to find who killed him. I gotta lie down. Somehow, all this, it has me worn out. You’d think all you’d do is cry, but it’s like all I can do is sleep.”

My long trek north to Morrell’s took me through the disturbing vistas of the western suburbs: no center, no landmarks, just endless sameness. Sometimes row on row of ranch houses, sometimes of more-elaborate, more-affluent tracts, but all punctuated with malls showing identical megastores. The third time I passed Bed Bath & Beyond and Barnes & Noble I thought I was driving in circles.

“Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, a long way from home,” I sang, as I sat in a stationary lane at one of the everlasting tollbooths on the rim road around the city. I was motherless, after all, and forty miles from Morrell’s home.

I flung my change into the box and scoffed at myself for melodramatic self-pity. Real grief lay in Rhonda Fepple’s story: the childless mother. It’s so out of the order of nature, and it exposes you as so fundamentally powerless, to have a child die before you: you never really recover from it.